Archive for June, 2007

I picked up Silverhawks and M.A.S.K. season 1 (Sorry, not region 1), and finally managed to get Star Blazers series 1 for under $100. I swear Vlad and Phil are going to be like small children with a sack of candy when they get a hold of my dvd collection. ;-)

Odd thing I noticed. I picked up a copy of Chris Benoit’s documentary DVD for 12 bucks Monday when I knew what happened about 3pm CST that fateful day. A bit morbid I know, but there were only 4 on Ebay and it was sealed and cheap. Now I went on to look and there are 123 copies, all selling between 25-30 bucks. Ouch.

Been a good weekend so far. Pulled the Mind Flayer Lich at Night Below which was one of the two pieces I wanted. it’s very mean. I went 1-2 but both times I lost only because I critical missed a routing save. If I hadn’t they’d have died that turn. Still, good battles all around.

Grim Grimoir review some time this weekend. God damn Nippon Ichi and Dreamcatcher for still sending me games and thus making me feel like I have to review them. Which i do. it’s only right. Dead Reefs is after that and that leaves me Hoshigami and The Bogs to play for FUN. Sigh.

I really need to get together with people tonight, and tomorrow seeing as I won’t get a chance to for a while after that.

Now it’s sweeping and litter box cleaning. Tomorrow I have to clean the bathroom and kitchen. Busy days ahead, but nothing to interesting. At least not until Monday night.

CHICAGO (AFP) - In a breakthrough that could potentially lead to a cure for HIV infection, scientists have discovered a way to remove the virus from infected cells, a study released Thursday said.
The scientists engineered an enzyme which attacks the DNA of the HIV virus and cuts it out of the infected cell, according to the study published in Science magazine.
The enzyme is still far from being ready to use as a treatment, the authors warned, but it offers a glimmer of hope for the more than 40 million people infected worldwide.
“A customized enzyme that effectively excises integrated HIV-1 from infected cells in vitro might one day help to eradicate (the) virus from AIDS patients,” Alan Engelman, of Harvard University’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, wrote in an article accompanying the study.
Current treatments focus on suppressing the HIV virus in order to delay the onset of AIDS and dramatically extend the life of infected patients.
What makes HIV so deadly, however, is its ability to insert itself into the body’s cells and force those cells to produce new infection.
“Consequently the virus becomes inextricably linked to the host, making it virtually impossible to ‘cure’ AIDS patients of their HIV-1 infection,” Engelman explained.
That could change if the enzyme developed by a group of German scientists can be made safe to use on people.
That enzyme was able to eliminate the HIV virus from infected human cells in about three months in the laboratory.
The researchers engineered an enzyme called Tre which removes the virus from the genome of infected cells by recognizing and then recombining the structure of the virus’s DNA.
This ability to recognize HIV’s DNA might one day help overcome one of the biggest obstacles to finding a cure: the ability of the HIV virus to avoid detection by reverting to a resting state within infected cells which then cease to produce the virus for months or even years.
“Numerous attempts have been made to activate these cells, with the hope that such strategies would sensitize the accompanying viruses to antiviral drugs, leading to virus eradication,” Engelman wrote. “Advances with such approaches in patients have been slow to materialize.”
New experiments must be designed to see if the Tre enzyme can be used to recognize these dormant infected cells, he wrote.
“Although favorable results would represent perhaps only a baby step toward eventual use in patients, the discovery of the Tre recombinase proves that enzymatic removal of integrated HIV-1 from human chromosomes is a current-day reality,” he said.
The researchers who developed the enzyme were optimistic about their ability to design additional enzymes which would target other parts of the virus’s DNA.
However they warned that there were significant barriers to overcome before the enzyme could be used to help cure patients.
“The most important, and likely most difficult, among these is that the enzyme would need efficient and safe means of delivery and would have to be able to function without adverse side effects,” wrote lead author Indrani Sarkar of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden.
“Nevertheless the results we present offer an early proof of principal for this type of approach, which we speculate might form a useful basis for the development of future HIV therapies,” Sarkar concluded

Man between the DC thing, the Benoit thing, the fact I haven’t been able to sleep all week and other assorted madness, you have no idea how badly I want it to be NEXT weekend, as the stressors and needed nonstop energy won’t end until the 4th. I’m sure I’ll be spending Independence Day sleeping and little else.

This weekend I have Night Below on Saturday, then I’ll be going home and doing a mass cleaning. Sunday will be a review of Grim Grimoire, which will be lucky to get a 5. Holy hell how are some people giving it an 8? It has as much depth as Pong.

Reposting of the Top 30 RPG Countdown. Every Friday for the next few weeks, we’ll be going back nearly 4 years to see what the hell was I thinking when I wrote this one. There’s definetly a few games on here I’d knock off.

Monday and Tuesday are going to be so exhausting. I’m looking forward to the brief trip out to DC but also dreading it.

LONDON, England (Reuters) — The Spice Girls, who burst on to the music scene with “girl power” and attitude in the 1990s, have reunited for a world tour, their Web site said on Thursday.

“Hey everybody!! We’re back!! Can you believe it!!” Ginger, Sporty, Posh, Scary and Baby Spice announced on their Web site .

The Web site said the group had come together for a world tour and provided a link for fans to buy tickets in 11 cities across the world starting on December 7 in Los Angeles.

The five-member band is the latest in a long line of pop acts to bury past differences and reform, hoping for success where many others have failed.

The Spice Girls boasted album sales of 55 million during their brief career, and hits including “Wannabe” and “Say You’ll Be There” topped charts across the globe.

But the success was shortlived, with Geri “Ginger” Halliwell leaving in 1998, four years after The Spice Girls was created, and the remaining band members going their separate ways after releasing the album “Forever” in 2000.

All now in their 30s, the singers embarked on solo careers with varying degrees of success, and rumors that they may one day reform have circulated for years.

Victoria “Posh” Beckham has maintained the highest profile since the band split, helped by her superstar soccer-playing husband David and regular appearances at fashion shows and on tabloid front pages.

The couple are moving to the United States where David has signed to play for LA Galaxy, and Victoria aims to carve out a career of her own in fashion and television.

I went to bed at 1:30 and woke up at 5:30am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I am so exhausted it’s not even funny. 4 hours of sleep is not something I can function off of. Lunch time = nap time.

Grim Grimoire is a truly awful AWFUL game. The dialogue and plot is horrible, the game play is slow and repetative and it’s just a truly awful game in all ways possible. Fuck it’s bad. Stay away from this. It COULD possibly improve, but when my first mission was 5 minutes long and just involves summong elves and watching them run back and forth and the bonus mission was 45 minutes long. Well, that’s just bloody terrible.

Dan suggested a last minute late night showing of “Live Free or Die Hard.” I said sure. Movie ended at 1am, but it was quite good. Smart, funny, and a worthy sequel. Maggie Q is smokin’ as always.

Adieu Tony Blair. Your decade long reign started out pretty good and then it crashed and burned. As long as Gordon Brown is only 1/10th the puppet for Bush you were, England will be a better place for it.

Okay, I get a message in this here bloggy type contraption from my friend Matt aka Skywayman from LJ.. He wants to know if I’m willing to review Chicago for Darktwincities.com, the slightly new equivalent of an MSPGoth website that replaced Gothling.com for reasons I am unsure of. (as a total aside, why is it that in most cities both in the US and abroad calling a goth a “Darksider” is considered exceptionally derogatory akin calling a homosexual a faggot or a Jew a kike and so on and so forth, yet the word is used to describe the community here. Just a weird thing I remember making me go “WTF” when i first moved here. Is it a ‘take back the night’ kind of thing?)

Anyway, I decide to call Matt since his message is “let me know ASAP” and I know wordpress only shoots back comments to me. So I whip out myself phone and call Matt. But I don’t get Matt. I get his sig other.

Her: What time is it?
Me: Oh crap! Did I call your home phone? I thought this was Matt’s cell.
Her: We don’t have cell phones.

Now I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Matt with a cell phone, but maybe he got rid of it.

Me: Crap crap crap. I woke you didn’t I? I am so sorry.
Her: Hey, it’s okay. Let me get you his work number.

I apologized, thanked her for the number and called.

Other Line: UMP Neurology Clinic. This is Matt. How can I help you?
Me: OH CRAP!

You see, I have two friends named Matt in Minneapolis. Both are in my cell phone right next to each other. I called the wrong Matt, got the wrong sig other, and got the right number for the wrong Matt. Instead of calling Skywayman Matt, I called Matt Yaeger, fellow ex-IP staffer and currently working at UMP, the place I worked at before my current day job.

Wah wah wah.

We had a laugh about it. I apologized, told him to apologize to his wife on my behalf and called the right Matt. Ho ho ho. What a morning.

But hey, free play and I get to write a review about something other than video games for the first time in a long time.

I totally forgot I had my “Victim of the Crossface” t-shirt on today as a Chris benoit memorial kind of thing. Takes on a whole knew meaning now, especially as the front of the shirt is just a bunch of broken bones and the back says “BENOIT.”

I went to pick up THE BIG’S today and even though I preordered it, my EB only got one copy of the WII version in. Fuck. Oh well, it’s not like I have to review it or anything. I just wanted a Wii MLB game. eventually it’ll come in.

There were a dozen people in the store. A third were totally offended by the shirt, a third thought it was fucking hilarious, the other third were pretty clueless. Whod’a thunk?